Culture and Economics

In a recent review essay in this journal (25.2), Timothy Morton considered a number of works of literary criticism on the centrality of commodification in Victorian literature and culture. This essay will look at the intersection of work in which economists and literary critics have interrogated Victorian economics and their afterlife: models of production and reproduction (classical political economy and Malthusian population theory), consumption (the calculation of pleasure, happiness, and taste), labor (as a theory of value), value (in relation to price), “Economic Man” (as productive pursuer of gain or, after the 1870s, rational chooser among scarcity), and so forth. This work, which has brought into dialogue economists, literary and cultural critics, and historians and philosophers of science, has flourished in the past decade, and this essay will focus on aspects of it relevant to the study of Victorian Britain

Art · Commodification · Economics · Economy · Literary criticism · Literature · Media studies · Morality · Pleasure · Political science · Positive economics · Print culture · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Economic Theory and Institutions · Economic Theory and Policy · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Psychology

• The Law of Progress and the Ironies of Individualism in the Nineteenth Century

  Regenia Gagnier•New Literary History•2000

  Add to list

• The New Economic Criticism

  Mark Osteen, Martha Woodmansee•New Economic Criticism•2005

  Add to list

• Natural Images in Economic Thought

  Open Access•Philip Mirowski•Natural Images in Economic Thought•1994

  Add to list

• Beyond Economic Man

  Marianne A Ferber, Julie A Nelson•Beyond Economic Man•1993

  Add to list